> If you can’t run on $current_debian, that’s very much a you problem.

This is a reasonable position for most software, but definitely not all, especially when you fix a bug or add a feature in your dependent library and your Debian users (reasonably!) don't want to wait months or years for Debian to update their packages to get the benefits. This probably happens rarely for stable system software like postgres and nginx, but for less well-established usecases like running modern video games on Linux, it definitely comes up fairly often.

▲

teddyh 5 days ago | parent [-]

Something I have seen that recently have become much more common is the software upstream authors providing a Debian repository for the latest versions of their software, including backports for old Debian releases.

	▲	rcxdude 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		Yes, mainly because such repositories don't have to follow debian's policies, and so it's a lot easier to package a version that vendors in dependencies in a version/configuration you're willing to support (and it's better to point users there than at an official debian version because if debian breaks something you'll be getting the bug reports no matter how much people try to tell users to report to the distribution first)